One Department for Employment & Learning (DEL) award is available for full-time postgraduate PhD research in the School of Modern Languages, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Queen’s University Belfast.

Supervised by: Dr Fiona Clark (Lecturer in Latin American Studies, School of Modern Languages) and Prof. Mary O’Dowd (Professor of Gender History, School of History and Anthropology).

Recent decades have seen an increased interested, within the field of Irish migration studies, in the links between Ireland, Spain and Spanish America. Whilst significant attention has been paid to the exodus of Irish to the English Americas and even to Spain, less is known about their movements in the 18th century within the broader Spanish Empire. In terms of medical practitioners particularly, much is still unknown about the individuals who chose to forge a career in non-English speaking foreign lands. The current project aims to explore the importance and breadth of medical and social networks open to Irish Catholics in the pursuit of successful medical careers within the late-colonial Spanish empire, including links to key merchant networks, and to analyse their impact on the transfer of scientific knowledge. By studying central players, such as the Irish physician, Timoteo O’Scanlan, a leading and yet largely unstudied figure in Spain with links to government, merchant networks, and the Irish in Spanish America, the project will seek to highlight the linguistic and relational functions of a particularly Irish identity framework, and to analyse the idea of a ‘discourse of migration’ wherein portrayal of national identity shifts depending on the demands of the local power structures; the manipulation of expressions and terms of identity linked to political, confessional, and educational alliances or frameworks. The skills necessary for this work demand a collaborative effort between specialists in Irish and Spanish culture and history, as well as bi-lingual abilities (native or near-native fluency in Spanish and English).